Wednesday, January 16, 2013

LinuxMint 14 Add Printer Issue

LinuxMint 14 Add Printer Issue

I wanted to print from my LinuxMint 14 (Cinnamon) PC via a shared Windows printer on my network. Problem is it isn’t found by the printers dialog in system settings. I thought I’d done all the normal things to get samba to play nice like rearranging the name resolve order in /etc/samba/smb.conf to a more sane bcast host lmhosts wins. Having host and wins, neither of which I’m using first in the order cocks things up some what. Every time I tried to search for the printer in the system setting dialog it told me “FirewallD is not running. Network printer detection needs services mdns, ipp, ipp-client and samba-client enabled on firewall.” So much scratching of the head there then, because as far as I can tell there ain’t no daemon by that name available!

It turns out thanks to /pseudomorph this has been a bug since LinuxMint12 (based on Ubuntu 11.10). It’s due to that particular daemon (Windows people daemon pretty much = service) being Fedora specific and should have no place in a Debian/Ubuntu based distribution. Bugs of this nature really should be ironed out sooner.

Anyway the simple fix is to use the more traditional approach using the older printer dialog which is accessed by inputting system-config-printer at the command line. Which works just fine so why the new (over a year old) printer config dialog that is inherently broken I ask myself.

The CUPS web interface also works apparently http://localhost:631/ in your favourite browser which should be there as long as CUPS is installed which it is in LinuxMint by default.

So come on Minty people get your bug squashing boots on and stamp on this one please.

Update

Bug #871985 only affects Gnome3 so as long as its not affecting Unity that will be okay Canonical will it!